Reformers stress cybersecurity risks

BALTIMORE — Supporters of cybersecurity reform are playing offense throughout the region this week, emphasizing dire digital threats to the nation’s critical infrastructure in a bid to break a long-running political stalemate.

At conferences, panels, speeches and other events in Washington and elsewhere, lawmakers and top White House officials have hyped the risks to state secrets, corporate property and the public’s well-being posed by hackers and spies while reaffirming the need to patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities before the year’s end.

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The roadshow stopped in Baltimore on Tuesday. At an industry conference, the White House’s top cybersecurity adviser, Michael Daniel, said the latest spate of cyberattacks around the world marks a “significant escalation in the cyber threat.”

Daniel didn’t discuss the White House’s behind-the-scenes push to address cybersecurity reform on its own through a possible executive order. But as the Obama administration readies its next move — and the Senate prepares to try again on a bill in November — key players think they can break the stalemate with the power of persuasion.

“I think right now, we’ll find a way if we get the will,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told POLITICO. “We’re developing the will because of the great sense of urgency.”

For now, cybersecurity has become a daunting race against the political clock.

With each passing day, the odds diminish that the White House can promulgate its own reforms by fiat before the election. And there isn’t much time for Congress to bridge differences that have stalled legislation for years, long before the Senate failed to bring a bill by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and others to vote before its August break. For die-hard corporate opponents of a law, it’s all good news: They can try to wait it out and dodge strict new rules altogether.

Against that backdrop, reform supporters are hammering away at the significant vulnerabilities plaguing the country’s digital defenses — a campaign tied to the so-called National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Daniel, as the administration’s cybersecurity leader, in his speech on Tuesday here at the CyberMaryland 2012 conference, cited a number of recent attacks on U.S. and foreign entities. His takeaway: “No system is off limits.”